Just about five weeks after the formal announcement, ATI RADEON 9800 PRO-based graphics cards started to appear for sale in Japanese retail stores. We would definitely have found ironic in this sentence if I had written this four or five years ago, but, with today’s fashion to paper-launch GPUs, CPUs and other computer hardware components bunch of time before actual release, it is a noticeable event when certain company can start selling a device just a month after its announcement via press-release and loads of hype around the Internet. For instance, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra only started to appear in retail roughly four months after the announcement and in case of the NV35, NVIDIA’s CEO himself, Jen-Hsun Huang, promised that his company is “going to wait until we are nearly in retail before we launch it officially”, but unfortunately we still do not know what did he mean by “nearly”.

Connect3D company shipped the first batch of the RADEON 9800 PRO powered cards to its Japanese partners, but unfortunately either the quantity of the cards was very limited or the demand was too high, but all the products were sold out for just one weekend, as this Japanese web-site reports.

The prices of the novelty are high enough, but keeping in mind limited quantities we believe they are “nearly normal”: from $470 to $520, whereas the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra cost from $498 to $542 when it was firstly seen for sale and is even now priced at about $500 (see this news-story). Actual price of both graphics cards are still far away from their MSRP of $399.

Connect3D’s RADEON 9800 PRO graphics cards are made fully according to the reference design from ATI Technologies, equipped with 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory and features D-Sub, DVI-I as well as TV-Out connectors. The VPU is clocked at 380MHz, while the memory functions at 680MHz. According to ATI Technologies, the company ships its RADEON 9800 PRO graphics cards to some of its customers now (see this news-story for more information).